Dota 2 AI Quick Start

08 Jan 2017

Dota 2 7.00 (The New Journey) introduced Bots API, which is quite good news for people like me. I am a fan of the game but I never manage to have enough skills or APM to compete with online players. So being able to write my own bots must be a lot of fun. However the official document is very bare bone and unfriendly for people who are new to Dota 2 modding. So here is a simple quick start for people who want to start writing Dota 2 bots.

Your Working Directory

Find your Dota 2 installation directory, let’s call it $DOTA. Go to $DOTA\dota 2 beta\game\dota\scripts\vscripts and you will find a bots_example directory. Make a copy of that, rename it to bots — all bots code resides inside that directory. If you start a practice match with bots, it should read bot scripts from that location.

Now you can take a look at official reference (minus the reference, just read the introduction). Here is TL;DR:

1. Bot scripts can be either override mode or completely takeover. The former only override certain mode, which is a good starting point for new developers.
2. Bot scripts are recognized by file name. So just create Lua scripts with corresponding names and Dota 2 will try to read from them.
3. Lua is used as the scripting language. If you are not familiar with it, I happens to have written a pragmatic quickstart guide, which is intended for experienced developers: Part I, Part II
4. Lots of in game data (like heroes, abilities, items) is located at $DOTA\dota 2 beta\game\dota\scripts\npc, which is a good reference. Game item names can be found here, which is not mentioned on the wiki.

Start a Bot vs. Bot Match

1. Enable Dota 2 console by adding -console launching options.

2. For bot vs. bot match to work, the example script need to be modified. Open hero_selection.lua and you can see the script tries to select 0-4 for radiant and 5-9 for dire. However, this is only true if you are in the game. For bot vs. bot match, 0-1 is reserved (maybe for coaches?) so radiant is 2-6 and dire is 7-11.

3. Create a lobby (Play Dota -> Create Lobby) and edit lobby settings. Choose Local Dev Script for Radiant and choose any difficulty except none. Also tick Enable Cheats.

   

4. Make yourself either a coach or unassigned player and start the match.

Speed Up Development

1. Show console: after you have added -console launch options, you can toggle console with a hotkey (default is \). You can find all the debug info in console, including your print() statement in Lua script, which is very useful.

2. Reload code: after you change your bot scripts, it will not automatically reload if you have an on-going game. You can use dota_bot_reload_scripts command in console to reload your bot scripts. The is the single most important trick I’ve learned and I am surprised that it is not mentioned in the wiki.

   Also please note there is a bug in recent Dota 2 (as of writing) that will crash the game if reload bot scripts in bot vs. bot lobby game. So for now you can start a practice match instead.

3. Speed up game: if you are testing your bot strategies, you might want to speed up the game. Use host_timescale 4.0 to make the game run at 4x speed. You can change the 4 to anything you prefer. You have to enable cheats to achieve this (use sv_cheats 1).

More Resources

1. Bot Scripting Wiki
2. Script API Wiki
3. Moddota Wiki
4. /r/dota2AI
5. Bot Scripting forum
6. furiouspuppy’s bot scripts
7. My own bot scripts (very premature)
8. Finally and most importantly, happy hacking!